Netflix recently aired an artfully offensive comedy special by beloved-worldwide comedian Dave Chappelle. In response, employees demanding it be removed from the streaming service organized a walkout to protest the “transphobic” ideas the jokester dared to utter in The Closer, a special that also involved (amusingly) comparing Jews to Nazis and enjoining everyone to uphold an ethic of individualism. In the wake of a campaign to censor Chappelle, the New York Times reports that “one employee questioned whether Netflix was ‘making the wrong historical choice around hate speech.’” Co-CEO Reed Hastings replied somewhat absurdly: “To your macro question on being on the right side of history, we will always continue to reflect on the tensions between freedom and safety. I do believe that our commitment to artistic expression and pleasing our members is the right long-term choice for Netflix, and that we are on the right side, but only time will tell.”
We don’t need time to tell, though. We know right this very second that it’s wrong to censor art because of a humorless political holy war. It’s good that Netflix management is holding the line (for now), but it is absurd to imagine that freedom and safety are in some fundamental tension or that freedom is not the higher virtue. What safety is there in an unfree society? What honest historical inquiry is conducted? The only honest firsthand history of Nazi Germany was written on toilet paper in prison. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, scholars, including historians, were denounced as part of the campaign to tear down the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Most repented under duress for saying what they believed to be true.
Perhaps 20 years earlier, some 1940s Chinese history scholar worried about being on the “wrong side of history.” But he probably did not predict the circumstances under which history would be written in his future. He could not have. The only reason someone would imagine he knows that history will be written favorably to his cause is if he believes history is not a word for a type of inquiry, but rather a word for “God,” and that he is himself history’s prophet.
Interestingly, the words “history” and “science” meant the same thing at their etymological origin. Science comes to us via Old French from Latin words such as the adjective sciens (knowledgeable or smart), the verb scire (to know), and scientia (basically meaning just established knowledge). History also comes via Old French, from estoria, which in turn comes from the common Latin and Greek historia and the Greek noun for an expert or person who knows, histor. Both words once meant, generally, “inquiry to try to establish knowledge.”
This is more than just useful trivia when you use it to think about the way that “science” and “history” are invoked today by progressives who are convinced that the historians of the future will vindicate whatever it is they prefer. They are never used to refer to a complex, social, iterative process undertaken by a community of researchers who are wrong a lot of the time. Rather, in progressives’ minds, just as “science is real” (and on their side of thorny ethical debates), “history” is a metaphysical phenomenon with sides and momentum and moral intentions. It inevitably moves in the right(eous) direction. That’s why there is an unfortunate tendency to rope into a debate a projection of some future historian who agrees.
Fantasy future historians are rhetorically powerful allies. But they are, of course, not actually powerful, since they don’t exist. Any good historian will tell you we don’t know the past with total certainty, and any child can tell you we can’t know the future.